The Truth About Youth was a 1930 Warners’ production based on a 30-year-old play, When We Were Twenty-One, by a writer named Henry V. Esmond. Produced under the “First National” imprint, The Truth About Youth was probably considered an antediluvian story then — the play had been produced on Broadway three times but the last time had been 1906 — and it doesn’t seem like screenwriter B. Harrison Orkow did much to update it. The top-billed star is Loretta Young, playing gooder-than-good Phyllis Ericson, daughter of the housekeeper to Col. Graham (J. Farrell MacDonald), who has been raising the young Richard Dane (David Manners) since he was six and his father died in an accident. Dad apparently lingered on a bit before expiring, since his last instructions were that Graham and his friends Richard Carewe (Conway Tearle) and Horace “Waddles” Palmer (Harry Stubbs) form a trio of guardians to raise young Richard, whose childhood nickname “The Imp” has stuck even though as the film opens he’s just about to turn 21.
The Guardians (that’s how they’re referred to throughout the movie) and Phyllis have planned a surprise birthday party for the Imp, complete with a symbolic place setting for his deceased father, but the Imp doesn’t come home that night; instead he phones and says his old psychiatry professor is lecturing that night at Carnegie Hall.
I wasn’t aware any nonmusical events ever took place at Carnegie Hall, but it doesn’t matter because as any even remotely experienced moviegoer could guess that’s just a blind. What the Imp is really doing is attending the opening of the swank Firefly Club, featuring a spectacular entertainer called Kara (Myrna Loy), who performs as “The Firefly” and sings a song called “Playing Around” (by Sam H. Stept and Bud Green) that reflects her character’s utter disinclination towards monogamy. The Imp has formed a mad crush on Kara even though the Guardians have been expecting him to marry Phyllis, with whom he’s grown up — and Kara, an out-and-out golddigger who contemptuously tells her French maid Babette (Yola d’Avril) that she wouldn’t even think of continuing to see her last boyfriend after he lost all his money, is stringing the Imp along because she thinks he’s in line to inherit a major fortune, even though in fact he and the Guardians are almost totally broke (though, typically for a 1930 movie, they still get to live in an enormous, lavishly appointed mansion).
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